The Haunting of Harrison Wells
by Quartic Moose
Summary: Harrison Wells died in 1958. Nearly sixty years later, Barry meets a ghost in STAR Labs... (ghost story AU)
1. Chapter 1

A/N: In a bit of a reversal, this fic owes its existence to its own podfic - I can honestly say if luvtheheaven hadn't recruited me for the DCU Bang, it never would have gotten off the ground and finished. Just as a play is meant to be performed, this is a story meant to be listened to, and she did an absolutely amazing job so I highly recommend you go check it out on AO3!

luvtheheaven was also my beta, and made the cover art!

Warnings for brief strong language, canon-typical violence, and some horror tropes (though no gore)

* * *

Four weeks into his internship at STAR Labs, Barry is stopped in the hallway by Cisco on his way out.

"Hey, before you leave, do you want to see something awesome?"

Barry had met Cisco his first week at STAR, and they'd become fast friends with a lot of common interests, so Barry is confident that Cisco has a pretty solid definition of 'something awesome,' and it would definitely be worth taking the time to see. "Of course."

Cisco grins and leads him down several hallways to a freight elevator tucked away in the west wing of the research complex. He fishes out a key to call the elevator, and when it arrives he hauls open first the sliding exterior doors and then the metal grate of the elevator car.

"Why this elevator?" Barry steps gamely inside at Cisco's exaggerated flourish.

"This is the only one that goes down far enough. We're going to Sub-Basement 3, baby!"

"What? There isn't a Sub-Basement 3." Barry realizes as he says it that there very likely _is_ , because lying about it makes no sense, and would probably rank even with 'I got your nose!' for World's Most Transparent Prank.

Cisco smirks, and presses the bottommost right-hand button (the numbers have long-since worn away, and Barry notes with only mild trepidation that the elevator inspection certificate is four years out of date). With a lurch, the elevator starts to descend, much slower than Barry is used to and groaning like a metal beast all the way, and it is with some relief that he finally steps out once they reach the bottom.

Cisco flicks on a light switch, revealing a wide hallway with black-and-white checked tiles and a low ceiling. Sounds echo eerily in the empty space; Barry's grown accustomed to the constant hum of machinery and equipment in STAR Labs proper, especially the all-encompassing HEPA air filters, so much so that the sudden silence this far underground in a deserted wing presses against his ears like they are stuffed with cotton.

They don't have to travel far down the empty corridor to reach their destination; Cisco turns to the left to open one door that is just like all the other doors they'd passed (and Barry would have raised the question about whether they were even allowed down here, except the door isn't locked…)

Inside is a lab - an old lab, probably part of the original construction. All of the equipment looks dated, from the sixties, maybe even the fifties - the height of the Cold War, and the gauges are analog and the consoles covered in switches and dials and indicator lights, and Barry is overcome by the desire to poke _everything_. He spends so long staring at all the equipment, wondering what it was all _for_ , that it takes him a while to notice the rest of the room.

There are several chalkboards set up, covered top-to-bottom in writing and equations that he does not recognize, and a lab bench in one corner with a chemical safety cabinet behind it. There is a modern mini-fridge, two plush bean-bag chairs, and a tangled mess of wires and parts around a shiny metal machine that looks half-finished at best, and ready for the scrap heap at worst.

"I call it the Cortex." Cisco gestures grandly to the room. "It's where I come to think sometimes. And to get away from distractions – it can be hard to find a way to forcibly remove yourself from the internet, but this place was built to be x-ray and radar-proof, and it's three stories underground; there's no way any kind of signal is getting through down here, no way no how."

Barry blinks in surprise; he hadn't thought Cisco was the kind of person who'd willingly part with modern technology. He turns slowly, still trying to take in the aesthetic of the whole space. "Who else knows about this place?"

Cisco flops backwards into a bean bag and fishes out a bag of twizzlers. "Just Caitlin and Ronnie - but they're both off on their honeymoon at the moment."

"But then… if no one knows about it, how did you get an elevator key to get down here?"

"Oh, well," he waves one twizzler airily, "other people _know_ it exists in the abstract, it's not actually a _secret_ , but we're the only ones who come down here. And all the freight elevators use the same key, so that's not a problem."

"Huh." Barry collapses into the second bean bag chair and accepts the twizzler Cisco offers.

They chat for a bit, mostly about science. Cisco explains what some of the apparatuses were used for; Barry stares in admiration at a yellowing, aged poster that begins with ACHTUNG! and ends with ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN. This is, without a doubt, the coolest lab he's ever been in.

Eventually, Cisco gets up and goes to work on the unfinished machine at the center of the room, and Barry wanders after him.

"This - " Cisco pats it fondly " - will one day go 'ding!' when there's stuff."

Barry snorts. "Really, what does it do?" He isn't an engineer, and the tangle of wires is all pretty incomprehensible to him.

"My friend, you are looking at the world's first prototype tachyon particle generator."

"Tachyons!? But those are only hypothetical!"

"They're only hypothetical _now_ ," Cisco corrects.

Barry stares in wonder, trying to tamp down his skepticism so as not to offend his friend. It is an incredible claim; while he has no doubts about Cisco's intelligence, the thought that he could have come up with such a design at his age is more than a little unbelievable.

Cisco must see something in his expression, or else he just guesses the direction of Barry's thoughts, because he laughs and claps one hand on Barry's shoulder. "Relax, I can't take all the credit. The design is all Dr. Wells'."

"Who's Dr. Wells?"

Cisco grins and gestures with one hand. "He's around."

Barry has a sudden and acute feeling of being watched prickling on the back of his neck, and becomes aware of another presence in the room. He spins around as though he expects the elusive Dr. Wells to be standing right behind him, but the lab is as empty as before – he blinks and shakes his head - _how could he have been so certain that -? why had he thought…?_ – His eyes alight on one of the chalkboards, off to his left, which bears new words that send a chill down his spine as he reads:

 _Hello, Mister Allen. My name is Harrison Wells._

Barry jerks back a step and stumbles, because he _definitely would have noticed_ if that message had been there before.

"Cisco! Is this a prank?!"

Cisco stops stripping a set of wires, and looks between the board and Barry with an expression that vacillates between mirth and sympathy. "Nah man, that's just Dr. Wells. Did I forget to mention that he's a ghost?"


	2. Chapter 2

Once Barry gets over his shock - which does, admittedly, take some time and is not at all helped along by Cisco ("Dude, the look on your _face_ ") - he is left with so many _questions,_ though his brain still feels like it's rebooting and he has yet to pull himself together enough to ask any of them. He finds himself sort of collapsed into one of the bean bag chairs; the movement wasn't quite a conscious effort on his part so he's also sort of half-flopped onto the floor. Cisco's sitting next to him in the other bean bag, and he's been grinning widely ever since it became clear that Barry was not, in fact, going to hyperventilate and pass out.

"There's a ghost in the lab," Barry finally manages to croak out with an impressively steady voice.

"Yeah, man. That's not going to be a deal-breaker, is it? Because this is a very ghost-tolerant endeavor; my great-aunt has been haunting our attic for at least a decade, and she never bothers anyone."

Barry stares at him a moment, nonplussed; he thinks _we had a deal?_ and _this is not how I thought my day would go_ and _holy shit did someone_ die _down here?_ but what he blurts out is, "I'm sorry for your loss. I mean, I'm sorry to hear about your great-aunt – that she died, not that she's a ghost! That's… cool, I guess… My condolences?"

Cisco regards him critically for a moment. "You're looking a little pale; do you feel light-headed? Here, have a dum-dum." He thrusts the sucker insistently towards Barry until he takes it.

"Thank god you didn't say I looked like I'd seen a ghost." Barry is starting to feel like he's getting some of his equilibrium back.

Cisco scoffs. "Too easy. Do I look like an amateur to you?"

"Um…" In deference to his own sense of comedic timing, Barry pointedly does not answer, and instead looks down at his dum-dum. "Do you have any other flavors? I'm not a big fan of sour apple."

Cisco tosses the whole bag at his head in response; Barry fishes out a red cherry sucker. Excellent.

"Dr. Wells, I think he's handling it very well."

Barry looks up, and sees that Cisco has turned to address the chalkboard, where new words have appeared, in a looping handwriting:

 _My apologies, Mister Allen. I did not mean to alarm you._

Barry's palms feel cold and clammy. He'd quite forgotten about Wells. Not the fact that he was a ghost, no, that was foremost on his mind - but he had forgotten all that that entailed. He'd forgotten, for instance, that haunting the laboratory meant that Dr. Wells was present at this very moment, that he could see Barry and hear everything he was saying.

Finally, he finds his voice. "Don't, um, don't worry about it." Good manners didn't cost anything, after all. "But I actually should be going; Cisco snagged me on my way out the door. This has been… mind-blowing, thanks for showing me, Cisco. It was nice to meet you, Dr. Wells." Barry nods in the general direction of the chalkboard, and hopes he isn't too far off the mark. (He wonders if ghosts even have singular, discrete presences.)

There's no reply from the chalkboard, and the moment stretches. Cisco waves to catch Barry's attention.

"What?"

"He can't move the chalk if you're watching it - it takes too much energy."

Barry turns that over in his mind for a moment. "So it's like being quantum locked," he suggests.

Cisco gives him an enthusiastic high-five. "We have _got_ to have a Doctor Who marathon someday, buddy," he says, before he adds more seriously a moment later, "But really, that's it exactly; it takes a lot more effort for him to affect something that's being observed."

Barry looks back at the board to see it has changed once more:

 _I hope to see you again, Mister Allen_

"Please, call me Barry."

* * *

The ride back up in the elevator feels very different from the ride down. Cisco is just as bouncy and excited, happy to have shared his 'secret' room with Barry; he expounds upon his experiences working with Dr. Wells, filling in details while Barry mutely nods along, listening with half an ear.

Barry, meanwhile, feels like he's just taken a sharp detour into The Twilight Zone, and that any minute now Rod Serling's ghost is going pop up through the floor to start narrating - it isn't as though Barry's day could get any stranger.

He'd believed in ghosts once, when he was a kid. Well, maybe saying 'believed' was overstating things a bit; he had at least been willing to test the hypothesis. After all, while Sherlock Holmes, the most amazing detective _ever_ , had once famously said, "The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply," his creator on the other hand had been wildly enthusiastic about Victorian spiritualism, particularly séances.

Roping Iris into holding a séance themselves to try to contact the late great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had seemed like logical sense at the time, reasoning that a man who had strongly believed in séances in life would be more likely than other spirits to answer one after death, right? (Neither of them had raised the question of attempting to contact either of their mothers. On some level they'd realized that the cost of failure would be too great; it was better to test the methodology first.)

Bell and book and candle, and staying up waaay past their bedtime, even going so far as to _light the candle_ (very briefly, before they chickened out - Joe would have had a fit if he'd known they'd had a live fire in Iris's bedroom). Bell and book and snuffed-out candle, and no ghost.

Barry had been disappointed, but not surprised.

* * *

As soon as Barry gets back to his apartment, he Googles 'Harrison Wells' (he also Googles 'ghosts' and 'paranormal activity,' but it's too difficult to sort the credible from the conspiracy to be of much use). There's not much on him; he was a physicist who worked at STAR Labs and died of a heart attack sixty years ago. Wells had had a wife who'd died in a car accident two years earlier, and they' had one daughter.

He is able to find a couple of Wells' academic papers on JSTOR, and the man was - is? - clearly brilliant. But the question remains – why, _how_ , did he become a ghost? Cisco seemed to think 'unfinished business' was reason enough, and the guy did have more experience with ghosts, what with his great-aunt and all, but in Barry's opinion, if that were all it took, there'd be a great many more ghosts hanging around. He needs more information.

And who better to ask than a professional investigative journalist?


	3. Chapter 3

After a long day at CCPN, Iris just wants to sit down and eat, but first she needs to help Barry set the table. He asks about her day and sympathizes with her frustrations with Mason Bridge; when she asks the same he fidgets, and then asks her for a favor, as a reporter.

"Intern," Iris corrects him. "Like you I am but a lowly intern."

"Yeah, but you still have, like, access to databases and things, right?" he persists.

She holds up a hand to stop him from going any further. "I need to know exactly what you're asking for before I agree to anything."

Barry chews his lip and fusses with the silverware he's just set down. "I just want to know more about Harrison Wells."

"Who?"

"He was a scientist back in the fifties, but he died before he made any really notable breakthroughs, otherwise there'd probably be a biography about him or something that I could read instead."

Iris thinks that over for a moment while Barry makes hopeful puppy-eyes at her. On the one hand, satisfying Barry's nerd-curiosity can at times be like trying to fill a bottomless pit - there is no end to his desire to learn more - and if he's come to her because he's exhausted his internet resources, it means she'll probably have to root through hardcopy to find the information he wants, which will be a total pain.

On the other hand, Iris has perhaps more than her fair share of reporter-curiosity, which on the face of it is very similar to nerd-curiosity, though usually pointed at different things. If she's going to do this, Barry's going to have to make it worth her while, and that means the story she chases needs to be intriguing.

"Why do you want to learn more about this guy, anyway?" she asks, bemused.

There's a pause that's a little longer than usual, and Barry shrugs, aiming for nonchalant and missing by a mile. He affects a disinterested tone of voice, which doesn't mesh at all with his obvious interest (Iris mentally rolls her eyes at the doofus). "There's a rumor that he's haunting one of the labs."

Iris hums thoughtfully, narrows her eyes shrewdly. "And instead of investigating the lab to find out what's causing the rumor, or questioning ghosts as even being a possibility, you want me to look up Harrison Wells?" The pieces do not add up. "Since when do you believe in ghosts?"

Barry hesitates for several long moments, wavering with indecision, before he finally caves. "I've seen him," he admits. "Well, spoken to him. Cisco says he's seen his reflection on occasion, but he's been working down there a lot longer than I have."

"Working down where?"

And that's how the whole story comes out, about Sub-Basement 3 and Harrison Wells, and their hopes to build a prototype tachyon generator.

Iris listens without interrupting, holding her questions until the end, except to ask for clarification on a couple of points. Her dad's working late, so it's just the two of them, sharing a ghost story.

Dinner happens, but Barry keeps going, though with frequent pauses to chew his food (thankfully with his mouth closed). Finally both the meal and Barry's meandering explanations wind down, and Iris goes back over the notes and questions she's jotted down on her napkin.

 _Who, what, where, when, why, how._ Something has changed Barry's opinion on ghosts, and her first order of business is determining whether she believes as well. She already established early on that Barry isn't trying to lie to her - he frankly doesn't have the skill necessary to keep a straight face when trying to prank someone. Besides which, the punchline for this particular prank – if it is a prank – would undoubtedly be something as uninspired as 'boo!,' and Iris likes to think Barry is a little more original than that.

But this doesn't rule out the possibility that Barry himself is mistaken or has been hoodwinked.

Iris tries to be methodical in her questions. She doesn't have a lot of practice conducting interviews, but she does have years of experience drawing answers out of Barry, which she works to her advantage. Barry doesn't really know much about what's going on with Wells - so many of her questions are answered with shrugs - but by the end of the evening Iris is convinced that he really did encounter a ghost in STAR Labs.

She can hardly believe her own conclusion, but she knows Barry, and she knows what her gut is telling her. Moreover, she knows that as a reporter she needs to fit the story to the facts, not the other way around, and to be objective in all things. Which, in this case, means keeping an open mind about the paranormal, and not imposing her own disbelief on the story presented before she's even had a chance to fact-check it.

A lot of it does, admittedly, hinge on Cisco's honesty about not setting up some sort of relay or hologram. It is damn impressive what master illusionists can do these days. Magically-appearing words on a chalkboard would be well within their capabilities. And the fact that the words only appear when the 'audience' is _looking the other way?_ Easy justification for the perfect set-up for some legerdemain. Being open-minded does not mean being gullible.

And yet.

Barry knows all this as well as Iris does; they watch the same reality shows about stage magic, and the last time the West-Allen family had gone to see a live magician, she'd been the one to put her foot down and stop Barry from explaining how the tricks were done.

Barry was there, in Sub-Basement 3. Barry was the witness, and Iris knows that Barry knows better than to accept things at face value. He values science and the empirical method above all else, and Barry does not - _did not_ \- believe in ghosts.

Barry is also not gullible, though she knows it's what some people think of him. He isn't gullible, just trusting, and why does that have to be a bad thing?

Barry is smart, one of the smartest people she knows, and his story stays consistent. Even his frequent sheepish shrugs when he doesn't know the answer to a question only serve to further sell its authenticity - he's not going to make things up to appease her, or tell her what he thinks she'll believe. If it were anyone else, she'd probably be a lot more skeptical, a lot harder to win over, but this is _Barry_ , and she knows him better than anyone _._

She isn't sure what she feels about ghosts. For years, she's been quite content to not have any strong opinions on ghosts one way or the other, if it even occurred to her to think about them at all. Outside of October, imagery of ghosts rarely crossed her path, and whenever ghosts did appear in pop culture they weren't meant to be taken seriously. Maybe the movies might want people to be frightened of them, but Hollywood horror doesn't typically challenge one on an existential level. (Unless the Dead All Along trope is in effect; those can be real brain-breakers).

Now, though… Ghosts - real, bona fide, supernatural entities - are a thing. A real live house-haunting, bone-chilling, chain-rattling, card-carrying ghost was… friends? With her best friend.

So... Honestly, she still doesn't know what to think.

* * *

Instead of fretting over it, though, she does what she was born to do - she investigates. Some of this Barry could certainly have done for himself, it's not actually difficult to ask for records at the courthouse, nor does it require any special skills. But this is Iris's investigation now, and she likes being thorough; there is definitely appeal in seeing the job through from start to finish. She's already got a crisp, clean new notebook page ready to go, under the bold heading of 'Who Is Harrison Wells?'

She starts with Picture News' biographical database (on her lunch break, no less! Barry had better appreciate this), but like Barry's futile Google searches, there isn't much on an obscure scientist from the fifties that has made it into electronic databases; this is a search that will have to be done hardcopy. Fortunately, Harrison Wells was a Central City local, born and raised; otherwise this would be a lot more difficult. Birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, and property deeds are all a matter of public record, so she spends a long afternoon at the courthouse (and two dollars and twenty-five cents) making copies of documents.

Born Harrison Thomas Wells on June 26th, 1917 to Charles Melton Wells and Ruth Georgia Wells (née Franklin), he lived in his family's house on Appledale Road in Central City until 1934, when they sold their house for pennies on the dollar and disappeared from the city's records. And they weren't the only ones, Iris realizes upon further reflection; a lot of families packed up and left the Midwest during the Dust Bowl. Unfortunately, Iris doesn't have a way to search all the deeds and mortgage records across the country to find out where they moved to; fortunately, Harrison reappears in Central City's records when he signs a marriage license with Tessie Morgan in 1946, the same year he signed the deed to a house in Englewood, near the park. Jessica Wells was born in 1948; something in Iris's chest clenches when she realizes that Jessica was only eight years old when her mother died in a car accident.

In 1958, Dr. Harrison Wells himself died of a heart attack at the age of 41. On his death certificate, his occupation is listed as 'physicist,' with a note that he served with the 256th squadron of the Army Air Force in WWII.

Next, Iris hits up the library for information. It takes a number of weeks, but, piece by piece, she is able to gradually pull the picture together - though the endless scrolling through microfiche leaves her squinting, with a throbbing headache. While poking through archived newspapers, she even manages to uncover a series of photographs from WWII that feature a skinny white beanpole of a man whose regulation crew cut nevertheless managed to be exceptionally floofy.

Wells is surrounded by other young men in matching uniforms with similar (though less floofy) haircuts: his flight crew. (Are any of them still alive? Are any of them also ghosts?) Reading through the available information, she learns he was an accomplished flight engineer and flexible gunner on a B-25 bomber, who survived 30 missions in Europe and returned to the U.S. for some R-and-R; the war ended before he could be re-deployed.

Iris is amused to learn that Tessie Morgan was a WASP. Women Army Service Pilots ferried planes across the country, test-flew aircraft, towed targets for live-ammunition gunnery practice, and did whatever else Uncle Sam asked of them in order to free up male pilots to fight overseas. She wonders what the odds are that Tessie and Harrison met on an airfield. (She also makes a note to read more about WASPs later – they sound pretty badass.)

Harrison and Tessie got married immediately after the war, bought a house, and started a family - just as so many others did. Both of them went back to school for their doctorates, which was a little less usual. Then the Drs. Wells and Morgan started working at STAR Labs, according to the publication records Barry was able to find for her – there isn't anything on them in the local newspapers until Dr. Morgan's death in 1956.

The details are heartbreaking in their familiarity. Although not a tragedy that Iris has experienced personally, she's seen it play out, again and again on the news, and every time it's like a punch to the gut.

A drunk driver t-boned their car, as they were heading home from work together. Tessie Morgan was pronounced dead at the scene, the other driver also killed in the impact, while Harrison was taken to a hospital with a fractured arm and a minor concussion. No foul play, no unexplained elements, just senseless death.

Two years later, a small blurb appears in the Central City Tribune, noting that Dr. Wells was found dead in his lab, but that no foul play is suspected. The slightly sensational writing style seems to place a certain emphasis on the fact that Harrison was a widower, as though inviting the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Iris frowns. No cause of death is mentioned in the article – that information would come later, she supposes – and it seems pretty irresponsible for a newspaper to suggest it was a suicide without any evidence.

There's another article from the following week, with a little more fact and a little less speculation, though details are still pretty scarce. This one states that the cause of death was definitely a heart attack. Iris frowns, scanning the tiny newsprint for more details. A heart attack? She'd already known that fact before she started her investigation, but she hasn't really thought about it before. It just doesn't jive with what she knows (or thought she knew) about ghostly origins, which tend to feature violent, bloody deaths and a melancholy soundtrack. Barry told her that Dr. Wells might have stayed for unfinished business, which was certainly possible - his career had been cut short before it could take off - but what if there was more to it? Surely almost everyone, at the moment of their death, feels that they need more time? Who really, in all honesty, can say that they've finished _all_ their business in life, when it comes right down to it?

The more Iris looks, the more she realizes that the details about Wells's death are most often vague, missing, or contradictory. People expressed surprise that he had died so young, in the peak of health, and reflected on what a shame it was for the scientific community to lose his brilliance (because no obituary is complete without some objectification of the deceased). It's frustrating, but Iris refuses to be stymied.

Legally, a copy of an autopsy report can only be requested by next-of-kin, but fortunately for Iris, Dr. Wells' death was sudden and strange enough to warrant an inquest, which is the next best thing. She requests a copy of the report from the State Archives… and finds that it has been heavily redacted. Which is puzzling, and seems counter-intuitive; the purpose of an inquest is to review the known facts of a violent or seemingly accidental death and interview witnesses, ultimately shining a light on the cause of death. The quasi-judicial proceedings summon a jury to give a verdict on cause of death, primarily to determine whether a crime has been committed, so what could it mean that the record of a coroner's inquest, intended to provide transparency, is instead thoroughly marked in bold black strokes?

All in all, Iris thinks it lends a certain weight to the fact that his funeral service was closed-casket.

* * *

A/N: I know that in the show and comics "Jesse" isn't short for "Jessica," but looking at census data, "Jesse" as a girl's name, while somewhat popular in the late 1800s, fell in popularity until it was basically unheard of except as a boy's name, until it made a resurgence in the 1980s. "Tess" has similarly been changed to "Tessie" to reflect the time period in which she was born. "Harrison" was fine so I left it alone - and for some reason it started shooting upwards in popularity around 2010? What celebrity can we hold responsible for this?

Also here, have some infodump:

For the sake of the narrative, a lot of extraneous factoids had to be omitted. I did a _lot_ more research into WWII military history than I ever expected when I started this story, but figuring out which branch to put Harrison in took a great deal of deliberation.

I had two (at first conflicting) thoughts on where to put Wells. On the one hand, Earth-2 Harry's familiarity with a pulse rifle suggested a position as a sniper or infantryman, someone who knew his way around a firearm. On the other hand, his engineering ability would make him a huge asset to the Air Force (then known as the Army Air Corps). I finally settled on Air Force, because I liked being able to make a WASP connection with Tess, and figured maybe there was a gunner position he could have had on a plane… I spent hours researching, trying to learn the duties and responsibilities of different roles, trying to figure out the most likely place he would have gone…

Did you know you can watch original training videos from WWII, that they're public domain? I watched the ones for aerial gunner and B-29 flight engineer on youtube. In full. Because research. ;P

I was extremely torn, but then I learned that all aircrew had to attend gunnery school, so I could have my cake and eat it too! You have no idea how happy this made me.

Oh, and the 256th squadron is a nod to Joseph Heller's _Catch-22_.


	4. Chapter 4

Barry doesn't make it back to the Cortex for a whole week after his first visit, bogged down as he is with other duties – and maybe, just maybe, the thought of willingly walking into a haunted lab sends chills down his spine. The knowledge that Iris passed along – that Wells did in fact die right there in the lab – doesn't help matters. Intellectually, he knows there isn't any danger, but there is still a sliver of fear in the back of his mind, and he finds himself coming up with excuses not to descend to Sub-Basement 3. Finally, he can't in good conscience avoid Cisco any longer, who is probably wondering about the state of their friendship. Cisco's lab is empty when he arrives, however, so he has to finagle the use of a freight elevator key out of Hartley, and man does he hate owing that guy favors. If this is going to become a regular thing then they have got to come up with a more permanent solution.

When he walks into the Cortex, Cisco is busy at work at a chalkboard (one of the ones covered in formulae, not the one Wells used for communicating last time), scribbling in the narrow margins not already filled and tweaking variables as needed. He looks up when Barry enters and grins widely.

"I told you he'd be back!" he crows. "You owe me twenty bucks."

Barry, a little quicker on the uptake this time, realizes almost immediately that Cisco is not addressing him. On Dr. Wells's chalkboard, the surprisingly snarky response has already appeared:

 _'I'm afraid I don't have any cash on me at the moment. You will have to settle for bragging rights.'_

Cisco laughs, and gives Barry a double thumbs-up. "I never lost faith in you, my man."

"What are you working on at the moment?" He peers closer at the equations, his eye caught on an oddity. "Are those _runes_?"

Cisco shrugs and makes another correction, adding a small hook to the spiky symbol in front a series of numbers. "He'd run out of Greek characters. Think of all the variables never conceived before! You have to be able to think fourth-dimensionally; I have no idea how you were able to come up with this." Cisco directs this last comment towards the far chalkboard.

"They look kind of... arcane," Barry comments.

"They do, don't they?" Cisco agrees cheerfully. "Totally badass."

Barry stares at sharp, looping script, feeling out of his depth. "Anything, er… Anything I can help with?" He wonders, for the first time, just what he is doing down here. Hanging out with Cisco, of course, and learning from Dr. Wells, but it isn't as though he has anything meaningful he could contribute; there isn't a lot of overlap between forensic science and quantum physics.

But Cisco gives his offer serious consideration, as though it weren't a polite courtesy he'd be better off declining. "Actually… how good are you at taking down dictation?"

"Um. I'm not sure? I mean, I was a pretty fast typer when I was jotting down notes in class, but I don't know how many words per minute I can do; it's probably nowhere near a professional typist's levels.

Cisco waves him off. "I'm sure you'll do fine. Dr. Wells recorded some of his project notes as audio journals. The sound quality isn't good enough for speech-to-text to really work out - and there's not a lot of room for error in something like this. I've been going back and re-listening as needed, taking notes, but it would be a big help if I could control-F my way to finding the sections I need more easily."

"Okay, so you want me to just type up what's said on the tapes?"

Cisco clasps both his hands as if begging. "If you did, you would be a huge lifesaver."

* * *

Learning how to use the WebCor 'Royal Coronet' reel-to-reel player is an experience. Cisco picked it up at a flea market and repaired it himself; he knows it inside-out and backwards, and, like a drill sergeant, he isn't content to leave Barry alone with his baby until Barry has sufficiently learned the name and function of all its parts.

Barry understands reel-to-reel in principle - it functions exactly the same as a cassette tape player, except it's considerably larger and the magnetic tape needs to be manually attached to the second spool before it can play. But Cisco is fussy and replacement parts are hard to come by, so it is some time before he's satisfied with Barry's ability to use what is, essentially, a clunky, forty-three pound Walkman.

At long last, Cisco hauls out a dusty cardboard box of seven-inch tape reels from what used to be a small office back in the day but is now packed floor-to-ceiling with storage.

"These are mostly in order, I think. Not that it matters, really, but it could help you get caught up on what we're doing."

"Awesome." Barry picks out one of the earliest canisters and reverently brings it back to the player. He loads the take-up reel and the reel itself, carefully threading the tape around the tension arm and the spool, between the capstan and the pinch-roller, around a second tension arm, and finally winds it around the take-up reel. He triple-checks that everything is in order and that all the dials are where they need to be. (Cisco would seriously kill him if he accidentally recorded over Dr. Wells' journal entries.) With mounting excitement, he twists the knob to begin the playback.

* **clunk!*** [* _hssssssss*_ ] [*sound of a throat clearing*] _Journal log entry number one. This is Doctor Harrison Wells, and assisting me is Doctor Tessie Morgan. The date is February 11_ _th_ _, 1952, and we are currently in STAR Labs, about to embark upon -_

 ***clunk.*** Barry pauses the recording. "Is it really weird to be listening to this with you present in the room?" he asks aloud, directing his question to Wells (he hopes. Being insubstantial, the ghost doesn't have much of a direction to direct _towards)._

 _Not, I should think_ , comes the written reply, _any stranger than my mere existence in this room. When we find ourselves in such extraordinarily unique circumstances to begin with, our boundaries for what we consider to be, as you say, 'weird' are severely compromised._

Thus assured, Barry resumes the playback.

 ***clunk!*** _\- a remarkable endeavor to reach beyond the summit of mankind's knowledge and usher in a new era of understanding. A lofty dream, I am quite aware. And yet, as incredible as it seems, by our preliminary calculations it should be possible to harness tachyons for human use - the potential applications of such technology is without limit. It will bring about advancements in power, advancements in medicine, and though we are years away from throwing the proverbial switch – or the literal switch, as the case may be – every journey must begin somewhere, and ours begins today. Right here, right now, in this moment. Tessie, this is our moment…_


	5. Chapter 5

After passing along all the biographical information she's collected to Barry (who thanks her profusely but seems distracted by some new project he's started), Iris starts branching out her research into the paranormal. If researching how Wells died wasn't enough to explain how he became a ghost, she'll have to tackle the question from another angle: namely, how are ghosts formed?

It is, she quickly discovers, an exercise in perpetual frustration. She has no idea which sources are credible and which aren't, and she doesn't have anyone she can turn to for a recommendation. Not yet, at least.

However, as a side-effect of all her fruitless searching, Iris has been thoroughly exposed to all manner of ghost stories on a daily basis, and she sometimes imagines she can feel the repetition eroding her skepticism. She finds that, when she goes looking for it, there is a lot more evidence of ghosts than she'd previously thought: YouTube videos that make all the hairs on the back of her neck stand on-end; photographs that give her goosebumps the moment her mind registers that _something_ is _out-of-place,_ is not where it should be, is _impossible_ ; and an endless stream of _"I heard footsteps/crying/screaming/sobbing but there wasn't anybody there."_

But explanations of the whys and hows of ghosts are much scarcer. Most paranormal websites don't address the questions at all, or else give the same stock answers for how a person becomes a ghost – violent death or unfinished business (or both, in the case of vengeful spirits). Nothing that answers 'why this violent death, and not that one?' And no one can seem to agree on what ectoplasm actually _is,_ or what its properties are.

After two weeks of dead-ends and wasted hours, her meandering search finally lands her on a forum that looks more promising than most, in that it does not immediately bombard her with desperate, fervent assertions that ghosts are real, and instead treats their existence as a matter of course.

Girl13 points her in the right direction for books to seek out. She lists the pros and cons of each, and also gives Iris a basic rundown of ghosts and their attributes. She also has a lot of tips on how to spot fakes, and debunks misinformation with a certain panache that Iris really admires. Yxes-kigam may be an arrogant asshole, but Iris has to begrudgingly admit that his pointers on where to buy occult paraphernalia seem very spot-on. Both of them hesitantly pass along the name 'Constantine,' saying that he's the most knowledgeable demonologist, but that _under no circumstances_ should she give him her credit card number. Ever. Iris thanks them, and mentally files Constantine's name away as a last resort.

She is reassured to learn that while ghosts might fade over time, especially as they become forgotten by the living, they don't automatically become evil if left alone for too long, which had been a concern of hers. However good or evil a person was in life, so they remained after death; ghosts were not any more intrinsically evil or prone to violence than the next living person. Still, when weighed against all the unanswered questions she still has about who Wells was and why he became a ghost, this small fact does not amount to much.

* * *

Three days after embarking on his task and halfway through his fifth reel, Barry finally meets Caitlin (whom he's heard so much about from Cisco), when she finally gets back from her honeymoon. She hangs out at the Cortex sometimes, but like Barry, her chosen field does not allow her to contribute much - and as someone just returned from vacation, she has a bit of catching up to do and doesn't have _time_ for tachyons (does that count as a pun? Barry's going to count it as a pun).

Then there's Ronnie, who's an engineer and would definitely be a big help on the project, except he's terrified of ghosts and buys into all the 'doom and gloom nonsense' Hartley fills his head with (because Hartley is an asshole who likes to mess with people). So it's usually just Cisco and Barry working on the tachyon generator, while the twitterpated newlyweds make doe eyes at each other upstairs.

Dr. Wells continues to be focused with almost single-minded determination on getting them to finish the tachyon generator, which Barry supposes is understandable, for a ghost. Barry doesn't mind the long hours, and Cisco doesn't either (there's a sort of energetic gleam to his eyes that's absent when he's not working on the project). Sometimes, they do get distracted and start goofing off – they have a whole laboratory all to themselves, after all, to play in unsupervised. One truly bizarre effect of Dr. Wells' ghostly presence is that liquids tend to float upwards if left in an open container; Cisco keeps an assortment of novelty plastic straws on hand for drinking with. So it is inevitable that Barry and Cisco should come up with a variety of games they can play with zero-gravity beverages – after half an hour of 'Astronaut Pong,' Wells brings their shenanigans to a _literally_ screeching halt when he drags his chalk across the board so that its shrill squeaks grate against their ears.

Barry doesn't particularly like the feeling of 'being scolded by a principal' that he gets whenever Wells feels that their antics have gone on long enough, and _shouldn't they be getting back to work soon?_ Cisco always seems to take the rebukes particularly hard, so Barry tries to do his best to keep the distractions to a minimum.

 ***clunk!*** [* _hsssss*_ ] _Journal log entry number twenty-eight. The date is March 24_ _th_ _, 1952._

 _The Cosmotron at Brookhaven has been turned on – we wish them all the best with their new particle accelerator. However, we remain confident that the path to tachyons does not lie in_ accelerating _normal particles up to light speed. The necessary energy to do so is, as demonstrated by Einstein's superb formula, infinite. Instead, we will attempt to circumvent the laws of relativity by reaching beyond the fabric of spacetime, to particles that_ already exist _at superluminal velocities…_

It becomes routine. Each day, after Barry has finished with his assigned tasks as a forensics intern, he heads down to the Cortex to help Cisco and Dr. Wells, and sometimes Caitlin, with the Project.

Sometimes, they fire up the projector to watch movies. Cisco says it's to educate Dr. Wells on contemporary cinema, but Barry doubts that is the only reason. For one thing, in addition to cult classics they also watch Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that were definitely around in Dr. Wells' time. And for another thing, it is a straight-up transparent excuse to goof-off, watch movies, and eat popcorn. Barry isn't sure what their resident ghost thinks of their movie nights; Dr. Wells' lack of physical presence often makes it hard to judge what he feels about a lot of things. But his comments seem to be generally positive, as though he doesn't mind their intrusion into his space for something as superfluous as watching movies. Barry supposes that Cisco had at some point in the past impressed upon Dr. Wells the fact that mortals could not be productive 24/7.

 ***clunk!*** [* _hsssss*_ ] _Journal log entry number four-eighty-three. It is August 4th, 1955, at two thirty-five pm. Tessie has developed a new method of splicing together composite insulation capacitors. She wants to call them SQUIRLS, Sustained QUantum Isometric Resonant Lightwave Storage. I have tried to dissuade her but Jessica is on her side and I am outnumbered._

 _(Jessica is not allowed to do crossword puzzles without supervision anymore.)_

 _Meanwhile Gideon tells me that the renovations to the lab won't be completed until later next month; no word on how we are expected to continue our work in the meantime. Maybe we'll all just go on a family holiday – Jessica has been clamoring to go to that new park that just opened in California; how she expects us to afford to go to California, I have no idea. Her grasp of mathematics is usually much better than this, though she is only seven. I hope she'll be content to visit the planetarium instead…_

As the project nears completion, Barry finds that he and Cisco are spending more and more time in the Cortex. One, he swings by in the early morning, an hour before he's required to be in the forensics lab, only to find Cisco already there, tinkering away, and he realizes that Cisco has been sleeping in the lab. Barry shudders at the thought of doing the same; Barry gets along with Wells, and knows he's harmless - but there are some unavoidable side effects of being in a room with a ghost (namely the cold spots, chills, and back-of-the-neck prickles), and Barry thinks he wouldn't be able to get a wink of sleep in such a haunted room.

* * *

A/N: The Brookhaven Cosmotron really was turned on in March 1952. And a rather significant theme park did open in California in 1955 ;D

All that nonsense about SQUIRLS is complete technobabble, however.


	6. Chapter 6

Less than a week away from the Moment of Truth, Barry and Iris are chatting over lunch at CC Jitters. Barry has been trying, with moderate success, to impress upon Iris the brilliance of Wells' scientific acumen.

"His designs are just so incredible; his work in quantum theory was _decades_ ahead of his time." Barry gestures emphatically.

Apparently Iris is feeling particularly snarky today, though, because she's unwilling to accept that at face value. "Technically, we're now decades into his future; that might only make him a modern man. Or even ten years behind the times…"

Barry huffs out a breath and steals one of her chips. "Fine then, _centuries_ ahead of his time."

Iris hums thoughtfully, allowing him the point. "What exactly does a tachyon generator _do?_ And don't say it 'generates tachyons,'" she adds for good measure.

"Well, tachyons are a big deal because they're faster-than-light particles, and right now, superluminal speeds are purely hypothetical. And, given our understanding of special relativity, such particles could mean time-travel; since time slows down as you _approach_ the speed of light, actually _surpassing_ the speed of light could mean moving backwards through time – there are a couple of different theories on how the resulting paradox could be resolved. And of course, faster-than-light travel is a staple of science fiction space-flight, particularly interstellar travel; there's no other way to go such great distances in a single human lifetime, otherwise, or even several lifetimes."

Iris's brow furrows with thought. "Does it… It doesn't pinch space together, does it?" She pinches her index finger and thumb together on both hands and brings them together. Barry's not sure what she's pantomiming until he makes the connection – Iris didn't read a lot of sci-fi growing up, not as much as he did, but she absolutely loved _A Wrinkle in Time_ and the rest of the books in Madeline L'Engle's _'Time Quartet._ ' In it, Mrs. Whatsit pinches a piece of string together to explain that they were going to travel faster than light by shortening the distance between the two points, what she called 'tessering.'

"Sort of," he answers. "They're not quite a tesseract, more like… hmm… like if space-time was a porous sponge, then tachyon particles are the bits of sand than trickle through the openings that are already there. They already do exist on a different plane of reality, so calling it a 'generator' is a bit misleading; we'll just finally have the capability of _collecting_ all those loose tachyons that we previously couldn't even observe - "

"Space-time isn't really like a sponge though, is it?"

"Two words: Quantum. Foam."

Iris opens her mouth, gaping for a moment before narrowing her eyes. "I have no idea what that is, but I don't think you're using those words correctly." She waves it off. "Never mind that. What will you do with the particles once you've collected them?"

"Study them." Barry answers promptly.

Iris rolls her eyes. "Fine, don't tell me; keep your nerd dreams all to yourself."

Barry pulls a napkin towards him. "Imagine," he says, using a straw to drip his illustration, "that this dot is everything the human race has ever learned until this moment."

"Does that include twerking?"

Barry ignores her interruption and drips a second circle, as large as the napkin will allow. " _That_ , is everything we could learn from studying tachyons. It's a whole new way of looking at physics! It will literally change the way we think about… _everything_. And it all begins with this little marvel."

He grins as he pulls up the picture on his phone and turns it around so she can see the mostly-finished tachyon generator.

Iris's smile fades as she looks at the picture, though, and Barry doesn't understand why.

"Is that _Cisco_?" she asks as if she can hardly believe it.

"Uh, yeah, who else would it be?" Cisco is crouched in the foreground, one arm thrown companionably around the prototype and the other hand throwing up a peace sign. There's also a blur of light that makes Barry particularly pleased with how this photo came out, since it might be a lens flare or it _might_ be Dr. Wells, caught on camera.

"Is he doing okay? Getting enough sleep?" Iris asks intently.

"Ummm… I assume so? He hasn't complained about anything. Iris, what is this all about?" She's starting to freak him out a bit.

She stares at him for a moment as though he's speaking a foreign language. "Barry, _look at him._ "

It takes him a moment, but when he sees it he startles badly, and doesn't understand how he did not notice sooner.

Cisco… looks _gaunt_. He's got bags under his eyes, and his hair looks lank and unwashed. He's clearly lost weight, though it must have happened so gradually over the past fifteen weeks that Barry never noticed.

"Wow. I… I'll talk to him. I don't know if I could convince him to slow down at this point, though."

They lapse into silence, Barry's earlier enthusiasm considerably dampened.

"Has Dr. Wells told you anything about how he died?" Iris asks delicately.

"Hwuh? No, and I figured it'd be rude to ask. Where's this sudden morbid streak coming from?"

"You know I've been doing research. Well, some things just aren't adding up. Officially, he died of a heart attack – "

"Myocardial infarction," Barry corrects automatically. When he sees Iris's unamused glare, he holds his hands up placatingly.

"But I spoke with Detective Chyre, who had just joined the force at the time – "

"You… what?"

Iris plows on. "And _he_ said that there was something really messed up about that case – that Dr. Wells's heart had been _pulverized_ , but without any visible exterior wounds to his body."

"Why were you talking to Chyre? He retired years ago! Geez, Iris. I just asked for some more information on who Wells was when he was alive; I didn't need a deep background check!"

"You don't get it, Barry! Something is seriously not right about this whole situation. I thought you would be interested – weird cases are right up your alley, aren't they? But instead you keep focusing on all the wrong details."

Barry sighs and runs his hands through his hair. "Look, Iris, I'm sorry if I haven't been altogether with it; we're getting really close to turning on the prototype. It's got us all a little distractible lately."

Iris isn't willing to let it go that easily. "Barry. I want to talk to Wells."

He drops his head and lets it thump against the table. "Iris, we've been over this - I don't have the clearance to bring guests into STAR Labs."

"Then we'll bring him to us. We'll hold a séance."

Gaping, Barry sputters before finding his words. "Wha –Iris, we tried that when we were, like, twelve, and absolutely nothing happened. What makes you think it will work now?"

"Two reasons." Iris counts them off on her fingers. "For one thing, we know for a fact that Wells is still hanging around on this… plane, side of the veil, whatever – so we'll be calling local, not long-distance. He's already a ghost, and we _know_ he's a ghost, so reaching him should be a lot easier than trying to summon someone who may or may not have already crossed over." Holding up a second finger, she continues, "For another thing, I've been doing some research into the occult on the side, and I can now see a number of places where we got it wrong, last time. For instance, the candles do actually have to stay lit. It's kind of important. And it will be better if we can have four people instead of two, for the four cardinal directions."

"Er…uh… okay then. Did you have some people in mind?"

"Wally's back in town on spring break, and he owes me a favor. And maybe one of your friends from STAR Labs wants to help out? It will also help if we had something personal that belonged to the ghost when they were alive, to strengthen the connection of the summoning. Do you know where to find something like that?"

"I'll ask Cisco and Caitlin if either one of them wants to help. As for Wells' stuff, I've been listening to a bunch of his old journal recordings… though Cisco would probably be pretty paranoid about letting those out of the lab; he's very protective of them. But I'm sure I can find something in storage; there's a lot of his stuff that never got cleared out."

"Alright then, it's settled. We'll meet at my place on Friday night."


	7. Chapter 7

The stage is set: A folding card table is set up in the living room with four chairs around it. A compass lies flat on the table, to make sure the seats are properly aligned, and a thick, dribbly candle (as yet un-lit) has been placed at each corner of the table. In the center, the Ouija board takes pride of place; it isn't anything particularly fancy, just whatever Hasbro is selling, but then again it doesn't need to be. Its wooden planchette is vaguely heart-shaped, about the size of Barry's palm, with a circular hole at the narrow end. There is also an old pair of black-framed glasses that he managed to rustle up, tucked against one side of the board.

The players assemble: Iris, Barry, Wally, and Caitlin (Cisco couldn't make it, said he was busy).

Wally yawns expansively. "Why am I here, again?"

"I already told you; we're holding a séance," Iris says.

"You didn't tell me _that_ \- you just called and said you were cashing in your favor. I thought you meant something reasonable, something that wouldn't involve staying up 'til three in the morning. This should really count as two favors; now _you_ owe _me_ one."

"You know, you didn't have to stay up until three; you could have gone to bed and set an alarm."

Wally crosses his arms and grumps quietly to himself. "What the hell kind of witching hour starts at three in the freaking morning, anyway? Whatever happened to good old-fashioned midnight?"

Iris discretely elbows Barry, who's opened his mouth to answer the rhetorical question. A tired Wally was a cranky Wally, and he wouldn't appreciate being told that 3 a.m. _was_ the more 'old-fashioned' witching hour.

"Three in the morning just has a better chance of success than midnight does," she explains instead.

Wally stares at her incredulously. "A 'better chance of success?' You don't seriously think you're going to summon a ghost, do you?"

"Actually, Wally," Barry cuts in, "you're in the minority here; everyone else is a believer."

"What, no way! I thought you guys were just having fun. I didn't think you'd seriously think you could talk to a ghost."

Caitlin smiles behind her cup of tea. "It's not so unusual – well," Caitlin casts a skeptical eye over all the trappings of the séance, giving one of the candleholders an experimental poke. "I'm not convinced that all this… this…" she waves her hand, gesturing around them in lieu of finding the word she was looking for, "will actually have an effect, but Barry and I talk to this particular ghost in-person all the time."

Iris glances sideways at her. "Actually Caitlin, I'm a bit curious – I know I don't know you very well, but you seem like you would be more of a skeptic, the way you love science so much."

"Barry loves science just as much," Caitlin points out adroitly.

"I like science too," Wally chimes in, determined not to be left out.

Iris shakes her head. "Barry's always been more… flexible in his thinking. He totally wanted to be Agent Mulder when he grew up."

"Did not!"

"Did too, and I have the photographs to prove it."

Barry clamps his mouth shut. Wally looks intrigued – "Can I see tho – "

"No!"

Caitlin laughs at their exchange. "You're right to think that I would have been a harder sell than Barry, but truth be told, Dr. Wells isn't my first ghost."

"You're kidding." Barry turns to her. "Does everyone but me have their own personal ghost story?"

Caitlin shrugs. "Well technically, this isn't my story alone – it's Ronnie's story too."

Barry throws his hands up, exasperated. "That doesn't make me feel better – everyone at STAR Labs has seen more ghosts than I have!"

"Not Hartley."

"Hartley doesn't count. Ever. For anything," Barry declares flatly.

Annoyed, Wally glares at Barry. "I wanna hear her story. If I'm going to be staying up 'til the crack of dawn for some unfathomable reason, we might as well make it interesting with some ghost stories."

Iris glances towards the clock and Barry follows her gaze – they still have ten minutes until the witching hour begins (and regardless of what Wally said, dawn is still over three hours away and they'll definitely be done before then).

"Okay, we have time for one story," she says.

Caitlin looks like a deer caught in headlights. "Oh. Um. I didn't – I don't actually have a _story_ ghost story. It's not, narratively speaking, an actual ghost story; it's a story with a ghost in it, and to be frank, I'm not even sure it's that good of a story… I mean, I'm not the best storyteller."

Iris lays a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "Just do the best you can."

Caitlin takes a deep, steadying breath, and some of the color returns to her cheeks. "Right. Right." She nods decisively. "It all began when Ronnie, my husband, got caught in an explosion. Well, he was still my boyfriend at the time – this was maybe nine months after we started dating." Flustered, Caitlin refocuses on her story.

"Anyway, it was that train accident two years ago – Ronnie was onboard."

There is a sharp intake of breath all around. After all, there was only one train accident of note in recent history, that of the collision of the five-twenty train inbound from Keystone with the back end of an oil tank car. Computers and automated safeties and redundancies should have prevented the two trains from colliding, and yet… seventeen people died, and many more injured.

"Ronnie wasn't breathing, but the paramedics were able to revive him at the scene. He was one of the lucky ones; he got knocked back by the concussive blast from the explosion, but he didn't suffer any severe burns.

"He was understandably shaken up by the experience; after the crash he'd rather endure hours of sitting in traffic than set foot on another train. Which was fine; we could make that work. Things… started to return to normal. But then he started to get confused periodically. Temporary amnesia, where he wouldn't respond to his own name or forgot personal details momentarily - things like that. And then, after two weeks of this, the blackouts started. He lost whole hours of time that he couldn't account for, couldn't remember what he'd been doing or where he'd gone."

Barry frowns. Despite what Hollywood action movies would have people believe, losing consciousness for any length of time, no matter the reason, was extremely serious (any blow to the head hard enough to knock someone out was hard enough to kill them). Though for Ronnie to have been experiencing gaps in his memory so long after the accident suggested a neurological problem…

"We took him to doctors, specialists, had his brain scanned every possible way we could think of. They couldn't find anything wrong. Eventually, we all assumed it was a side effect of his trauma. And then I came down for breakfast one morning and another man was sitting in his seat."

At this, Barry gets goosebumps up and down his arms. For all that Caitlin said she isn't a great storyteller, Barry is completely engrossed, and it looks like Wally is hanging off her every word, while Iris is chewing on her lip the way she does sometimes when she's concerned.

"He looked just like Ronnie, he _was_ Ronnie, but he _wasn't_. The way he held himself was all wrong, and I just in my heart that this wasn't my Ronnie, and then he looked at me with dead eyes and he said, he said – " Caitlin's voice shakes with emotion and she takes a moment to collect herself, "He said 'Excuse me my dear, have you seen my wife?'

"He introduced himself as Martin Stein, said he wasn't sure how he'd gotten there. I recognized the name – Ronnie and I had gone to the memorial service to pay our respects to the other victims of the crash. He'd been a professor of physics, won the Conway Prize for Scientific Advancement three times."

Caitlin absently picks up one of the unlit candles from the table and rolls it around slowly. "I asked if I could talk to Ronnie, and he said he didn't think it worked like that. Though he _could_ feel Ronnie, and he had access to some of Ronnie's memories. We just needed a way to bring Ronnie back, and find a way to get Martin to move on. It was all very unintentional – possessing Ronnie, I mean. He just couldn't figure out how to get out on his own. So we went to Rabbi Kanigher – "

"Why a rabbi?" Barry asks, curious.

"It was actually Professor Stein's idea." Her tone turns fierce and insistent. "He wasn't actually a bad guy, you must understand that. _Dybbuk's_ are usually wicked spirits, but in Stein's case, something else must have interrupted the flow of his life energy and trapped him on Earth. Rabbi Kanigher said that sometimes a saintly person could haunt someone as punishment, but… in our case, Ronnie wasn't a bad guy either. The whole thing was like some bizarre cosmic coincidence - something about the accident maybe, knocking things awry. I don't know, I'm not an expert on soul transmigration theory, and at this point I doubt we'll ever learn all the answers.

"Rabbi Kanigher mediated a talk between Stein and Clarrisa – she was his wife – beforehand. I think it was really good for both of them, to be able to come to terms with his death. Then the Rabbi and the _minyan,_ the ten men helping with the exorcism, went into the synagogue… and when it was over, Ronnie walked out and he was alone in his body.

"And that was the end of it, more or less. Ronnie's met with Rabbi Kanigher a few times since then, to make sure he's healing well and see how he's coping, with the trauma of both the possession and the train accident."

Wally is staring at Caitlin, looking a little wide-eyed, clearly uncertain what to think about the story. Barry thinks it explains a lot more about Ronnie's attitude towards ghosts; a past possession _would_ instill a much greater and more lasting fear of ghosts than Hartley's deliberately dickish scary stories ever could. And Iris is nodding thoughtfully, thanking Caitlin for sharing her story.

By now, it's almost time to begin the séance. Barry flicks off the light switch in the corner while Iris passes around a lit taper so they can each light a candle. Everyone settles into their places, and Iris's phone beeps a one-minute warning.

An awkward silence descends.

* * *

Iris is trying not to have second thoughts about this plan, but this is getting really, really uncomfortable and she doesn't know what to do next. Does she just begin, or does she need to explain more first?

Nobody is making eye contact with anyone else, and the uncomfortable feeling grows.

"Does anyone else feel really, really ridiculous?" Wally whispers loudly.

"Wally!" Iris hisses back at him.

"Seriously, Iris, what do we do now? Do we start chanting, or something?"

There's a moment's pause, and then Barry intones somberly, clearly fighting back a smile, _"Owah tahgu siam. Owah tagu siam,"_

Wally is the first to catch on, and he cracks up, "Heh heh, _yeah_ you are."

 _Oh-what-a-goose-I-am._ Iris groans and buries her head in her hands; Caitlin rolls her eyes. The awkward silence, at least, is broken, which Iris can appreciate even if she'll never admit it. Clearing her throat, she takes charge of the situation. "I'll start. It would help if you guys joined in once you think you know it, but if you can't take it seriously you might as well keep quiet."

She rests the tips of her fingers against the planchette, waiting for everyone else to do the same before continuing. She takes a deep, steadying breath, shedding all her doubts as she carefully recites: _"O, clever spirit of the dead, Harrison Thomas Wells, traveler of your time, we present you offerings from life into death, and invite you into our circle. Move among us."_

On the third repetition, Caitlin picks it up as well, and by the sixth, everyone is speaking in unison.

 _*tap tap tap tap tap* -_ "- Sorry."

"Wha – Barry!" Iris scolds.

"I can't help that my foot's jittery! Too much coffee this late at night!"

"Well stop bumping against the table!"

They resume their invocation, falling into an almost meditative state in the dim lighting and the low drone of their joined voices. And, incredibly, the planchette begins to move under the guidance of their hands.

Iris stops the chant and raises her voice, focusing on her question and trying not to be distracted by the way the flickering candlelight plays across the glossy surface of the board. "Are we speaking with Dr. Harrison Wells?" That was something she'd learned in her research, the importance of verifying exactly who you were talking to.

The wooden arrowhead slides sideways to the far corner of the board, hovering over 'yes.'

"Can you tell us something only Dr. Wells would know?"

The planchette seems to shiver under their hands, and Iris resists the urge to withdraw and shake the prickling feeling out of her fingers.

The ghost's response resolves slowly, one letter at a time…

"I… M… … P… O… S… "

 _*BANG!*_ The planchette flies off the table and collides with the wall, denting the plaster. Everyone jumps violently, upsetting the table and knocking over the candles, which fortunately snuff out before anything gets set on fire… but that leaves everyone to fumble around in the dark after a severe jolt of adrenaline.

"Wha – what the hell!" Wally squeaks out. "I did not sign up for this! Iris, that's two favors you owe me now. what the hell."

Iris is still trying to calm her own racing heart. To go from such a calm trance to such a high alert – it leaves her shaking and disoriented. "Is everyone okay?"

Affirmative responses lacking much enthusiasm sound out from the dark. Barry finally manages to find the light switch, a welcome improvement even if it does startle everyone else, the unexpected sudden brightness chasing the last of the evening's shadows away.

"I wonder what happened, what it means," Barry muses. " S… impossible? Imposition? Maybe it's an acronym…"

Iris taps her chin thoughtfully. "There was a pause between the M and the P, so maybe he was really saying 'I'M POS…' Hmm… 'I'M POStmortem?' Or should that be 'POSthumous'?"

"We already knew that, though – why would he need to say it? Besides, that wasn't a pause – it just had further to travel."

"You don't _know_ that it wasn't an intentional pause though, and I think 'I'm pos-something' makes a lot more sense than ' _imposition'."_

Wally scowls at them as he rights the table. "It doesn't mean anything, just five random letters. If it was really a message from the Beyond, it would have more _meaning_. Start guessing, and you can make it mean whatever you want. Maybe the ghost was gonna POSt this to Facebook," he adds sarcastically.

"Well, maybe he was!" Barry shoots back. "Just because he's a ghost doesn't mean he can't use social media."

"Dude, that doesn't even make any _sense_. And you're just proving my point, that those letters could mean _anything._ "

"Not _anything_ , there are a limited number of words beginning with this exact letter combination…"

"Aaand I think we're done here," Iris puts forward, interrupting the impending argument that would no doubt be exacerbated by a lack of sleep for all parties involved. It's unfortunate that their evening got cut short, but she doesn't think she could convince anyone to immediately try again.

After Barry and Caitlin leave and Wally crashes in the guest bedroom, Iris makes one last pass through the living room to make sure everything is tidied up. Something catches her attention out of the corner of her eye, and looking up, she freezes. She can feel the blood chilling in her veins, and hears her heart beat absurdly loud in her ears –

\- Just above the dent left by the planchette, blood-red words are daubed in messy scrawl:

 _Stop looking_

Like a rabbit caught in the sights of a fox, Iris stares at the words, trying to make sense of them, trying to catch her breath, wishing with all her being that she were not alone in this moment.

She backs away, trips over the coffee table, and –

And when she looks back, the words are gone, the wall as clean and blank as it had been before, save for the minor dent still present. _What was that?_ She rubs her eyes, but the wall is a wall and nothing more. Did she imagine it? Was it the late hour and the atmosphere that had played a trick on her mind, or was it something else? Something more sinister, brought into the house when they rolled out a spiritual welcome mat…

"'Stop looking'… at _what?_ " she whispers into the dark, but no answer is forthcoming – which should be a relief, should mean that there's no one there to give an answer, but Iris only feels increasingly unnerved, standing alone in the dimly lit room until she can't stand it anymore.

Turning suddenly, Iris abandons the clean-up and races up the stairs like she's being chased by fire, dashing into her room and feeling absurdly silly for doing so – she's in her own house, there's no one behind her, a ghost couldn't hurt her anyway, and yet -

Her hands won't stop shaking as she gets ready for bed.

She sleeps with the lights on.

* * *

A/N: Rabbi Kanigher gets his name from Robert Kanigher, creator of Barry Allen and son of Romanian Jewish immigrants

Of all the things I did not expect to research when I began this story a year ago, 'jewish mysticism' one makes the top of the (quite long) list. If I have grossly misrepresented anything, please please _please_ let me know.

The name 'Ouija' is actually a trademark of Hasbro, the general term being a 'spirit board' or 'talking board.' Back in October, I was surprised to see Ouija merchandise when I wandered through the mall, since my fic was fresh on my mind (I'd just finished the rough draft) and I wondered at the coincidence of there being renewed interest in Ouija boards. Then I saw a trailer for the movie - mystery solved! So (not that it really matters), although this story draws inspiration from a lot of places (include Casper the friendly ghost, Edgar Allen Poe, and that one Yu-Gi-Oh/Real Ghostbusters crossover I read years ago), it does not in fact have any connection to the new Ouija movie.

My research into séances led me to stumble across the story of Christina, Queen of Sweden (her spirit was quoted in _Communication With the Other Side,_ one of the earliest books about talking to dead people), and _how have I never heard of her sooner?_ She was very well educated - one of the most educated women of the 1600s - who went around wearing men's clothing and forgetting to brush her hair, who loved books and theater, became a symbol of the Counter Reformation, abdicated the throne and moved to Rome at 28, and was most likely a lesbian.

^ It's discovering things like this that makes me really enjoy the research process. Which is why it's so helpful to have a beta like luvtheheaven, who knows me well enough to know when to nudge me back on task ;D


	8. Chapter 8

The morning after the aborted séance, Iris's phone starts ringing at the ungodly hour of… nine-thirty in the morning. Groaning, it takes her three tries to successfully answer it.

"Hello?" she mumbles, face still pressed to her pillows.

"Hi, this is Dr. Jesse Chambers, recipient of your very cryptic voicemail. Am I calling at a bad time?"

"Huh? Oh, no, now's fine." Iris feels a lot more awake than she did a moment ago. "You got my message?" she asks, and immediately wishes she could take the words back. Because Dr. Chambers _literally_ just confirmed she that she _had_. "Um never mind. Just let me get the coffee going."

"I know it's pretty early where you are, especially for a weekend." Dr. Jesse Chambers' voice is soft yet clear. "Your voicemail sounded urgent so I wanted to call as soon as I could."

Iris flushes. "Oh, I - I'm sorry about that. I had a whole speech planned that went right out the window as soon as I heard the beep, hence the babbling." She'd tracked down Dr. Wells' daughter earlier that week, which took some doing, since Jessica had moved out to Philadelphia and taken her adoptive family's surname, Lawrence. Then she'd married John Chambers and changed her name yet again; it was a wonder Iris managed to find her at all.

Dr. Chambers laughs, and Iris relaxes a bit. She measures the coffee grounds and adds them to the filter. "That's quite alright. Probably worked out for the best – it was odd enough that my secretary brought it to my personal attention; otherwise I might have missed it entirely. I'll admit, I'm curious what an off-the-clock reporter in Central City could possibly need my help with. You're not out to steal my research, are you? Because I'm mostly doing the CEO gig nowadays; you'd have better luck trying to bamboozle the R&D department."

"No, nothing like that. It's about… well, it's about digging up old history, so if you tell me to hang up and lose your number I'd completely understand, but I sincerely hope you'll hear me out - because I think my friend might be in trouble."

"Iris – can I call you Iris? – just go ahead and ask whatever it is you want to say."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to – " Iris cuts herself off and takes a deep breath. "Dr. Chambers, do you know how your father died?"

There is a sharp intake of breath, and a long pause. Iris would worry that the line has gone dead, except she can still hear breathing.

"Well." Dr. Chambers says. " _Well_. I have to admit, you've managed to surprise me, and at my age, after the things I've seen, there is very little that can do that. Though I might have guessed, when you said you were from Central City. My advice to you: let sleeping dogs lie."

Iris grips her phone tightly. "I'm afraid I can't do that. Things aren't adding up, and it might be important. I just… I know this matters."

"My father died sixty years ago; I fail to see how this is relevant today. Why were you even looking into him in the first place?"

"My best friend is an intern at STAR Labs. He and his friends, they found Dr. Wells' old notes, and they're trying to complete his final work."

Dr. Chambers' sharp intake of breath rattles down the line. "Oh, _oh_ _dear_. In that case, yes, I'll tell you what I know. Do you have a pen and paper handy? I hate having to repeat myself."

"If it's alright, I'd like to record this phone call. Completely off the record."

"Yes - off the record. I'll only talk off the record. Whatever else my father was, he was a brilliant man. I'd hate to see his name dragged needlessly through the mud, so many years after his death."

"The thing you must understand about my father, the one truth without which nothing else makes sense, was that he firmly believed the ends justify the means. Which was rather ironic, given how theoretical much of his research was – you'd think he'd have gone in for the applied sciences – but he would have been bored to be anywhere other than on the cutting edge, and to make the impossible possible you have to dare to imagine.

"That's one of the few things I remember about him, before – the way he had stars in his eyes. That didn't last. He wasn't the same after my mother died. That's to be expected, but he was fundamentally unable to move on, to take even basic care of _himself_ , let alone a newly motherless child. He became fixated on things…" she hesitates, then continues her story more slowly. "For a time, he absolutely believed that time travel was the answer, that if he could generate faster-than-light particles"

"Tachyons," interjects Iris, pleased to know the proper term.

"Right. He thought they would be the first step to creating a workable time machine. He was going to go back in time and prevent my mother's death."

Iris takes a moment to absorb the implications. "You said he believed it 'for a time.' Did he finally realize it wasn't going to work?"

Dr. Chambers snorts. "If by 'realize' you mean he abandoned one theory in favor of an even more outlandish one, then yes.

"I don't think he knew that I knew what he was up to. I was reading advanced calculus textbooks by the time I was nine; polysyllabic titles enticed me, rather than deterred me." She breathes quietly, lost in the memory. "I could only sneak peeks for so long before he caught me at it. He was so _angry_ when he saw what I was reading, but he should have known better than to leave a book where I could reach it. I only wanted to help him, after all. That's all I ever wanted to do. And for the first time in months he looked at me as though he could actually see me."

"What was the book?"

"It was called the _Necronomicon_ … He was trying to raise the dead, Iris," she explains gently. "From what I can gather, by trying to summon a demon."

Dread pools in Iris's stomach and her throat goes suddenly dry. _Demon-summoning_. _What the actual literal Hell…_ Pieces are sliding together in her mind and she is absolutely terrified at what the conclusion might be.

Dr. Chambers is still talking. "There's no good that can come of trying to finish his research, Iris, he… he cracked, at the end. His final notes are the senseless ramblings of a mad man, you can't possibly use them for any serious scientific endeavor."

"oh. I see." Iris hesitates before returning to her first question, which, as helpful as Chambers has been, still hasn't been answered. "Dr. Chambers… how do you think your father died?"

"How do I _think?_ It's all there in the autopsy report, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't know. But what I have been able to find has been full of inconsistencies."

Dr. Chambers' voice is much less nostalgic and much frostier when she replies. "His heart failed. There's no doubt about that." There's another long pause before she continues, so softly Iris has to strain to hear, "You wouldn't think that would be a particularly painful way to go, but… he died screaming."

Unnerved, Iris sinks slowly into a chair. "How do you know that?"

"I have the recording of his final journal entry. Puts a very- a very _exact_ time of death on the whole affair. The officers investigating the case asked that it not be submitted as evidence."

"What?! Why?"

"Too upsetting, they said. Unnecessary, they said. Really, I think they just didn't have a way to explain it. And before you ask… I've stopped trying to explain it myself. Of course I know what it sounds like, but at the end of the day, it changes nothing. My father brought about his own end – not on purpose, of that I am sure – but whether it was by stress, over-taxing his body, or by… other means… what does it matter?" Dr. Chambers' voice is heavy with years. "What does it change? He'd already left me even before he died. The best thing I could do was close that chapter of my life; I wasn't going to become obsessive the way he had, repeat his mistakes. And so I moved on. I kept the recordings, because… well, for posterity's sake, maybe. For intellectual curiosity, maybe – I don't know. I can send you a copy. Of his last few entries – I saved them to my computer. Share it with your friends, and maybe they'll stop their fool's errand before somebody gets hurt."

Iris thanks her for her time, and gives her email address. When she hangs up she feels shaky all over, and it is a very tense forty-minute wait for her inbox to ping, during which time she sips lukewarm coffee inattentively and tries - unsuccessfully - to get ahold of Barry.

* * *

A/N: Since the show has already mucked about with family trees, giving us Jesse Wells in place of Jesse Chambers, I figured I could follow their lead; in the comics, Libby Lawrence was Jesse Quick's mother, and in this story Jessica is a Lawrence by adoption.

Libby Lawrence's character Liberty Belle is closely tied to WWII. She was living in Poland in 1939, and in recognition of this my backstory for Tessie Morgan is that when her family came to the U.S. from Poland, their last name was Anglicized as they came through Ellis Island (I remain undecided whether it was originally "Morga," for being the most similar, or "Moczygemba," because the immigration official was just that lazy.)

In this fic, Jessica Wells became Jesse Chambers when she married John Chambers, who in the comics was her father. _Nothing incestuous is meant by this,_ in this story Wells is her father and she is no blood relation of John Chambers. The company mentioned is Quick Start Enterprises.


	9. Chapter 9

On Saturday morning, Barry arrives at STAR Labs around ten o'clock. While Barry does not technically need to show up for his internship on weekends, he's accumulated a bit of a backlog as a result of working down in the Cortex. More importantly, they were on the verge of activating the tachyon prototype – it would happen on Monday at the very latest – and Barry wouldn't be content to idle his weekend away at home.

He is also curious whether Dr. Wells had really showed up at the séance last night, but all thoughts of asking the ghost directly fly from his head when he hears the sounds of furious shouting as he walks down the hallway to his lab.

 _"Don't tell me you have no idea how this happened, Ramon!"_

It sounds like Hartley, though Barry has never heard him raise his voice before. Alarmed, Barry pushes his way through the half-open door.

"Well, it's the truth! I _don't_ know how – " Cisco stops when he sees Barry.

Hartley turns and sneers, "Come to blunder blindly in and offer your no-doubt enlightened opinion, Allen?"

"No, I just – "

"Then stay out of it!"

Barry turns to Cisco. "What happened?"

"Hartley's rats are dead. For some unfathomable reason known only to The Chosen One, he blames me."

"Who _else_ is constantly lurking about at all hours, and will not give a straight answer when asked what he is up to? Who bears a personal grudge against me, and seeks to undermine my work? Don't play me for a fool." Hartley's face is blotchy with emotion.

"Okay first off: you only _wish_ you were my nemesis, and secondly, even if you were I wouldn't go after your animals. That's _sick_ and _wrong_. I liked your rats a lot more than I like you and they didn't deserve that."

Barry steps between them, hoping to diffuse the situation by breaking Hartley's line-of-sight. "How did the rats dies, Hartley?"

Hartley's nostrils flare, and his response is sharp and clipped. "Cannibalism."

Barry starts picturing what that means, a writhing mass of rats consuming each other, teeth and claws and fur and - and he immediately shuts down that train of thought. Still… "How can you possibly blame Cisco for _that?_ "

Hartley somehow manages to look down on Barry despite the fact that Barry has several inches on him. "I can think of a number of ways he could have managed it; stress, drugs - the exact method does not matter."

"Look, as someone studying forensic science, I can tell you the method _does_ matter. You like Latin; try _modus operandi_ on for size. Or better yet, consider _'means, motive, and opportunity.'_ " Barry ticks off. "You need to establish all three before you can determine guilt – "

"Spare me the lesson!" Hartley picks up a beaker and looks willing to throw it. Deciding that this is not a rational argument that can be won, Barry grabs Cisco's arm and bodily drags him from the lab. They make it halfway to Barry's lab before they realize they aren't been chased, and slow down to catch their breath.

"You doing okay, man?" Barry asks.

Cisco jerks in surprise; he must have been lost in thought. "Yeah, yeah. Just… crazy what happened to his rats, you know? This was so not how I planned on starting this day." He brightens visibly, "Oh and what I day it will be! I got so much done last night – today's the day. The Big One."

Barry stumbles but regains his footing quickly. "What, _really?_ I can't – wow! That's… Cisco, this is incredible!" He's ready to follow Cisco down to the Cortex before he remembers his reason for coming to STAR Labs. "I still have some catching up to do in my lab before I can join you – things I've put off for long enough. Don't turn it on without me!"

Cisco clasps his hand to his heart solemnly. "That might be asking too much, my friend."

Barry laughs and claps him on the shoulder before turning down the corridor that would take him to his own lab.

* * *

Two hours later, he's made a pretty good dent in the number of samples he needs to run and is feeling pleased with himself, when Iris suddenly bursts into his lab, looking harried.

He startles badly and accidentally knocks his mug of coffee off the lab bench. "Iris! What are you doing here?! You're not supposed to be here!"

"You weren't answering your phone. Barry – "

"If someone sees you – "

"Barry! Listen! We've got more important concerns right now. Where's Cisco?"

"Cisco? He's down in the Cortex, getting everything ready." He grins widely. "We're going to turn it on today!"

Iris blanches. "Oh no. We have to stop it!" She grabs his arm and tries to drag him out the door, but Barry digs his heels in and refuses to move.

"Iris! Iris, slow down and explain, or I won't be able to help you."

"Barry, Harrison Wells isn't who we thought he was, and I don't think that machine you've been building does what you think it does either."

Barry doesn't budge (Iris keeps tugging regardless). "I'm going to need a little more than that to go on, Iris."

"He didn't die of a heart attack. He died trying to summon a demon, and he succeeded. Eobardthawne, the demon, crushed his heart, and has been masquerading as his ghost ever since."

Barry blinks. "Okay, wow. That's… really not what I expected you to say. Do you have any, any proof? Or something?"

"I spoke with his daughter; I listened to his dying words. It all adds up. Don't you see? I-M-P-O-S. Not 'impossible,' _imposter._ Somehow we managed to contact the real Harrison Wells and he tried to warn us before he got interrupted."

"That's a pretty big leap, Iris, how do you know you're reading it right?"

"I'd say the bloody message on my wall after the séance telling me to 'stop looking' is a pretty good clue, wouldn't you say?" she snaps.

Barry feels as though all the air has been sucked out of the room. Someone – some _thing_ – was leaving bloody messages for Iris? That didn't sound like the Harrison Wells he knew, but it _did_ sound like something a demon would do.

"What can we do about a demon? _A demon, seriously…_ " he supposes it isn't _too_ great a leap to go from ghosts to demons, but his rational side still rebels against the idea.

"Salt helps against most spiritual entities. I don't know much else; I was focused on researching ghosts."

"… Does it have to be table salt, or will any salt do? Because we've mostly got sodium ethanoate and other buffer salts in the lab…" Barry offers tentatively.

"I honestly have no idea, but something's better than nothing."

Barry hurries to the right shelve and returns with a half-kilogram jar of ammonium chloride. Iris is visibly trembling and he tries to reassure her. "I know we need to get to the bottom of this, but I don't think we're as pressed for time as you believe. Cisco's just fiddling with last-minute details; he wouldn't turn it on without me."

Iris looks him straight in the eyes. "Are you sure? Are you absolutely positive?"

Barry opens his mouth to affirm, but hesitates. It's true that Cisco has become increasingly distant, increasingly focused on the prototype to the exclusion of all else. If Wells really is some sort of demon, Barry wouldn't put it past him to have some sort of malignant influence over them, over Cisco in particular – Cisco, who has spent the most time in his company, who has invested the most, given the most of himself to the project… Barry's heart skips a beat and a knot forms in his throat. Cisco has _poured his heart and soul_ into the project, and what if that has repercussions?

Iris is still waiting for an answer. He meets her gaze head-on. "You're right. We need to hurry."

* * *

They race down the hallway, throwing caution to the wind.

* * *

[* _hssssss*_ ] _Journal log entry number two-thirteen. Tessie - I'm coming for you. Soon. I know it sounds impossible, but I swear it's true. I've, I've found a way. I can't stop thinking about you, Tessie. Just earlier today I remembered the day that I realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. It was my fifth and last week of gunnery school, and we were flying a drill at night - you were far ahead of us, towing the target. But there was a malfunction in your aircraft, and you needed to land in a field. We didn't know that, not at the time, just saw that you disappeared from our radar._

 _Panic. I abandoned my post and I seized the radio from Snowden; he'd made a mess of the whole system, we couldn't hear anything. And I could feel the fear rise in the back of my throat and something else rising also, some dark instinct inside me about what I would do to the ones responsible, the things I would do... unspeakable things. And it was in that moment that I realized, for certain, that I would do anything to get you back in my life._

 _We barely knew each other outside of drills, but when I thought you were lost, that was when I knew that you were the only one for me, the only one I could ever be happy spending my life with._

 _I'm coming for you, Tessie, and I'm going to get you back._

[* _hsssssss*_ ] [ _*_ sound of heavy breathing _*_ ] _... I have begun a new undertaking. I hope, I hope… well. That should be readily apparent. And by readily apparent, I mean real fucking obvious._ [*clunk.{2}*]

[* _hsssssss*_ ] _journal log entry… whatever number. Fuck it. The book I received from Russell Glosson has been very informative, though my knowledge on the subject is still incomplete. I might have to make use of his services a second time to procure the necessary tome. I shall begin with…_

 _* … It has now been… three hundred and eleven days since you were taken from me. Progress continues apace, though I have had to revise my initial thesis. It has become clear to me that there is no reason to think that the Subject should fear one denomination over the others. Mankind's philosophies are flawed and mutable, and I have concerns…_

 _*…The fact that counter-measures vary so widely between cultures tells me that there must be something else at work, some other common factor, some commonality that as yet eludes me…*_

 _*… I believe I have found a suitable subject. Its name is Eobardthawne. I will attempt to make contact next week, when the moon is in the optimal position…*_

[* _hsssssss*_ ] _New entry. The date is October 7_ _th_ _, at two-thirty-six a.m. Everything is set. Tessie, this is the moment. After years of research, I am ready to bring the Subject forward. I've prepared a containment circle that will prevent it from escaping and bind it to my will. All that remains is the incantation…_ [*sound of a throat clearing*]

 _Tibi gratias agimus quod nihil fumas, Eobardthawne! By the constraints of the circle, the points of the pentacle, and the chain of runes, I am your master! Credo Elvem ipsum etiam vivere! Eobardthawne, as the one who named you, I bind you to my will!_

[ _*…hsssssssssssssss…*_ ] [*thump _*_ ]

 _No! Don't - ! I command you! D-don't come any closer – You can't – aaAARGK- !_

[ _*…hsssssssssssssss…*_ ]

[ _*_ clunk. _*_ ]

* * *

A/N: Demon-summoning incantation brought to you by The Bartimaeus Trilogy and _The Spectacular Spider-Man!_


	10. Chapter 10

When they burst into the Cortex, the first thing Barry notices is that the light isn't right. He can't quite put his finger on what's wrong with it, but he knows it isn't right.

The second thing he notices is that Cisco is collapsed on the floor in a heap, and when he rushes to his side he finally gets a good look at the prototype tachyon generator.

It is turned on.

The machine glows with a dark energy, and the air around it twists and tears, like a mirage but more angular – sharp in a way that feels like it physically hurts his eyes. And yet, it's hard to look away from the monstrosity, and the sucking void growing around it; something deeper than mere morbid curiosity has got its hooks into his psyche, pulling all his focus towards the rift and freezing him into place…

Gasping for breath, Barry manages to wrench his attention away from the anomaly and back to Cisco, pale beneath him. He shakes his shoulder vigorously, desperately – "C'mon Cisco, you have to get up! Get up!" – but he remains unresponsive; his pulse, when Barry seeks it out, is thready beneath his fingers.

"Try the salt!" Iris urges.

"If you wanted _smelling_ salts you should have specified!" Feeling slightly hysterical, Barry complies, tossing a handful of ammonium chloride onto Cisco's chest. Nothing happens for a moment, and then the salt grains burst with brief light like a thousand tiny sodium flares, and Cisco begins to cough.

Groaning, he raises a hand to his temple. "Ugh, my _head_."

"Cisco! You're awake!" Barry exclaims.

The unexpected sound of slow clapping interrupts the moment. _"Well Done. That Was Really Quite Clever._ " The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, bouncing around the room without origin.

Barry turns in place. "Who's there? Show yourself!"

 _"Oh, You Wouldn't Want Me To Do That,"_ The voice says. " _Though I Daresay There Will Be Time Enough For That Later. Besides, You Already Know Who I Am._ " When it speaks, the low voice rasps like a shovel turning over grave dirt, setting Barry's teeth on edge.

Cisco struggles to his feet, leaning heavily on Iris and Barry's supporting arms. "You're… you're Dr. Wells… but… you're _talking_ , how are you talking?"

"He's not." Iris steps forward. "It's not Harrison Wells. It's the demon that killed him. _Eobardthawne_. That's your name, right?"

 _"Wow. You Brought Yourself A Friend. Welcome, Miss West. Barry Always Said You Were A Smart One."_ The demon's voice is snide and mocking, and Barry has a hard time believing it's the same… person… that he's gotten to know over the past few months. _"You're Just In Time For The Show."_

The prototype pulses with an unholy light, and Barry quickly turns his head away from the nauseating sight. But, like a black hole, it seems to warp the fabric of reality; it is a place where parallel lines might meet, where perspective is next to useless, and it's _leaking_. Shadows fall upwards, dripping towards the suddenly high, cavernous ceiling.

"I've got a _bad_ feeling about this," Cisco intones solemnly next to him, before he lists dangerously to the side; he would have fallen over if he weren't being propped up by Iris on his left side. His face is ashen as he pants for breath, and Barry's worry ratchets up yet another notch, even as white-hot fury blazes through him.

"What did you do to tachyon generator?!" Barry demands.

 _"Do?_ Nothing _– It Is Operating Exactly As It Was Designed To. There Is Nothing I_ Could _Have Done To It; I Have Been Without Tangible Form For Much Too Long. If I Could Have Done It Myself, It Would Not Have Taken Me Sixty Years To Reach This Point. You Cannot Possibly Conceive How Much I Loathed The Fact That I Had To Rely On Mortal Help. You Humans – As Pathetic And Contemptible As You Are Weak-Minded… Though You Do Have Your Uses."_

"So, what are you saying? That it was all a set-up?" Cisco's hands clench into trembling fists. "Your grand plan to build a Doomsday device?"

 _"Well, It's Not Grand At All, It's Actually Very Simple. I Knew With Enough Modifications Even This World's Primitive Technology Could Be Used To Open A Gateway To My Home Dimension. All I Needed To Do Was Convince Someone To Build It For Me."_ The voice pauses for a moment. " _The Fact That The Infernal Wormhole Will Unleash Hell Upon Earth Is… What You Might Consider An Unfortunate Side-Effect."_

Barry can see, reflected in the glass of the chemical cabinet, a blurry, indistinct figure, with far too many limbs flickering in and out of existence - a sooty, sulfur-colored form with blazing red eyes, like pits of lava. It paces back and forth, and Barry's heart lurches into his throat. He turns to Iris, but she's still struggling with the sight of the tachyon prototype-slash-Hellmouth and doesn't seem to have noticed the figure yet. Next to him, Cisco sways unevenly, and his nose is bleeding, a thin trickle of blood dripping over his lips and falling to the floor.

Barry thinks he might now know where Dr. Wells – where _Eobardthawne_ – is getting the energy to speak to them directly, and so for Cisco's sake they need to stop the madness and stop it quickly. It seems Cisco has just reached the same conclusion, because he wipes the blood from his face with a groan. "Aw man, _tell me_ _I'm not Ginny Weasley in this scenario."_

 _"I'm So Sorry."_ The demon does not sound sorry at all. _"I Have Grown Quite Fond Of You Cisco. In Many Ways, You Showed Me What It's Like To Be Human. I Did Not Anticipate, As Difficult These Past Sixty Years Have Been For Me, How Much I Would Come To Enjoy Working With You. With All Of You. And Yet. That Does Not Change What Needs To Happen."_

The fiery eyes reflected in the glass grow closer and closer as the demon keeps talking… and then, the figure gets impossibly _closer_ , as it moves out of the reflection and into the room – or else the room expands backwards into the mirror.

Barry has finally reached his tipping point – so overwhelmed by fear that it becomes a distant emotion, he has only one thought in his head.

 _Break the machine_.

It's obvious that's what they need to do; if a machine is holding a portal open to the Netherworld, then they must first depower the machine.

Cisco would be devastated to lose his years of work on the tachyon prototype… but then again, it didn't exactly perform as advertised, did it?

Barry gently eases Cisco over so that Iris is bearing more of his weight. She glances over at Barry, and he tries to silently communicate his plan; if she can keep the demon monologuing, keep him distracted long enough, then Barry can try to slide closer to the lab bench, where a very nice wrench might be just the thing to throw at the prototype's power cable.

Fortunately, Iris gets the message, and she turns to face the demon more fully. Barry is impressed with the way her voice barely shakes, despite the tremors he can see in her hands. "You killed the real Harrison Wells. I want to know why."

 _"You Might Think It Was Out Of Spite For Daring To Summon Me, Trapping Me In This Pitiful Plane Of Existence, But From My Perspective, He Was Less Than An Ant Beneath My Foot. Your Mortal Lives Are All So Brief, So Spectacularly Uneventful And Less Than A Fraction Of A Blink In The Face Of Eternity; What Does It Matter When You Die? What's Thirty Years, More Or Less?"_

"That's monstrous."

 _"I Know You See Me As The Villain. But If You Were To Look Back, Look Back Carefully At Everything That I Have Done, Every Wheel That I Have Set In Motion, You Would Realize I Have Only Done What I Had To Do. Nothing More, Nothing Less."_

"Did you kill Hartley's rats?" Cisco's voice is slightly slurred, and his breathing is heavy. "What purpose did that serve?"

 _"Oh. Well. I Got Bored."_

Reaching behind him blindly, Barry's fingers finally brush against cool metal, and he lifts it carefully with a sweaty grip.

Across the room, the yellow demon's many insubstantial limbs suddenly blur, and a funnel of wind picks Barry up and slams him into the wall. The demon traverses the length of the lab in an instant and stands in front of him, less than two feet away. Even this close its features are hard to make out – something in his brain rebelling against the thought of resolving the monster in greater clarity, maybe. The air thrums around it, and Barry feels like a plucked piano wire, stretched taut and vibrating at whatever hellish frequency the demon exudes.

 _"You Can't Stop Me, And You Never Will."_ Its breath in Barry's face is hot and rank, like meat left out in a fetid swamp for too long. Barry's throat is tight and he can't get enough air; he thinks the demon might be choking him, but all he can see are the red, red unblinking eyes.

"With Barry and Cisco in this fateful hour," Iris cries out from somewhere to his right, "I call on Heaven and all its Power…" The demon releases Barry and turns towards Iris; Barry whacks it as hard as he can with the wrench still in his grip, but Eobardthawne does not notice.

Iris continues her chant, steadily gaining volume. "The sun with its brightness; and the snow with its whiteness… and, and the fire with all the strength it hath - " With each word the demon seems to falter, its form condensing further and further until it almost resembles a man. A low, wordless, continuous snarl vibrates from the beast, and it lunges for Iris – but Cisco has already made a circle of salt around them and Eobardthawne is forced to stop, however momentarily.

"- And the lightning with its rapid wrath; and the _sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness; all these I place, between myself and the powers of darkness!"_

At the final word, the demon shrieks, a terrible, dread sound that makes all the hairs on Barry's arms stand on-end, as he covers his ears in desperation. Eobardthawne continues to cry and thrash, even as the demon breaks apart and comes undone before their very eyes, dissolving into nothing until not even ash remains.


	11. Chapter 11

They stand in stunned silence, scarcely daring to believe it might be over, until Cisco abruptly slumps down to the floor.

"Cisco! Are you okay?!" Iris moves to help him up, but he waves her off.

"Yeah. I'm never ever going to sleep ever again, but yeah, I'm okay."

Breaking out of his daze, Barry rushes over. "Oh my god, Iris, how did you _do_ that?"

Iris returns his hug, and he draws strength from the feeling of her heartbeat. _Alive, alive, they were all alive._ "I'm pretty sure I forgot a verse or two, but the important thing is that it worked."

"Good thing you did that demon research." Barry gives her one last squeeze before letting her go.

"Actually, I did my research on _ghosts._ And that wasn't from my research… I actually wasn't sure it would work."

"Then what was it from?"

Iris blushes. " _A Swiftly Tilting Planet_. One of the sequels to _A Wrinkle in Time._ It just… sounded right, in the moment. I memorized it years ago, just… just in case, y'know? I didn't believe any of it was real, but it sounded so convincing, and I figured it couldn't hurt to learn..."

"Okay, the demon's gone – _now what do we do about the swirling vortex of doom!?"_ Cisco cuts in, drawing their attention back to the prototype. Which has not ceased to be a Doomsday device despite the defeat of its designer. The floor beneath it moves like putty, insubstantial, and sparks frizz at the edges of the tear in the universe, arcs of lightning sometimes crashing outwards unpredictably. It has begun to revolve, slowly turning in place, and the whole room turns with it, loose bits of debris being picked up and pulled into its dark center. The grating, howling sound is a weight on his ears that tastes like granite.

"Can't we just pull the plug?" Barry squints against the stabbing darkness and tries to figure out where the cord is…

"Sure, we could do that, if you don't mind running the risk of creating a singularity that will consume three-quarters of the solar system," Cisco shoots back. "We have to disrupt its angular motion first."

"So… we either need a really, really fast-moving object, or a really heavy object, to push past it." Barry casts about for something, anything they can use – his eyes alight on the wheeled chalkboard behind the lab bench. (It still has the last message Wells wrote on it: _It is time._ )

"Guys… I think I found something."

Cisco follows his line of sight. "That… could work. You'll have to get the angle just right though… and you'll have to pass really close to that thing for it to have any effect."

Barry nods, and determinedly pushes down the nausea that rises in his gut at the thought of getting any closer to that pulsing _wrongness_ , at the realization of just what a risk he's going to take.

"Barry…" Iris does not look at all happy.

"There's no time to argue, Iris; you need to be ready to pull the plug when Cisco tells you to."

Lips pressed into a tight line, she nods, gripping his shoulder tightly for a moment before moving into position near the power outlet, skirting the edges of the room and keeping as far back from the prototype as she can.

Barry confers with Cisco, lining up the heavy chalkboard for best trajectory. It isn't as heavy as it could be, so Barry's going to need to run with it as fast as he possibly can to have enough inertia to disrupt the momentum of the tachyon prototype. All too soon, it's the moment of truth, and Barry takes several deep breaths. He sets his shoulder against the chalkboard and tenses his legs, but he feels frozen in place, and panic starts to creep into his thoughts, because _what if he isn't fast enough?_

"You can do it, Barry! I believe in you!" Iris shouts to be heard from across the lab, over the sucking, howling vacuum of the dimensional tear.

"Run, Barry, run!" Cisco gives him a push for good measure, and then Barry is off like a shot, pushing the massive chalkboard in front of him and slamming his feet against the tiled floor, closing his eyes and trying not to think of anything except _faster, faster, faster._

Gravity does funny, unexpected things as he runs, and he nearly loses his footing several times as he tries to compensate. He makes it to the other side and lets go of the chalkboard; it crashes into the far wall and the slate breaks into a thousand pieces. Cisco shouts "Now!" and Iris pulls the plug at the same time that a stray bolt of lightning arcs outwards from the portal and strikes Barry in the chest, knocking him backwards into the chemical cabinet.

 _"Barry!"_ Two voices cry out in unison, rushing forwards.

Dazed and feeling as though his every nerve were on fire, all-over static tingle and his heart pounding in his chest, Barry manages to pull himself upright and out of the mess of broken glass.

"I'm okay, I'm okay!" He's not sure that that's true, but he's awake and he can move, and after being attacked by a demon and nearly sucked into a black hole, he's counting the fact that he's even alive as a win. Still… "Do you think getting struck by lightning from a portal to a hell dimension will have any side-effects?"

"Nah man, I'm sure you'll be fine."

* * *

 _fin_


End file.
